The Greek Study Modern Welfare System

The welfare system of Greece originated in the1920s and developed rapidly in the1980s.The development of the welfare system was closely linked with the Panhellenic SocialistMovement (PASOK). Since the1980s, PASOK had gradually become one of the main politicalparties in Greece. As the most important governing party from1980to2004, PASOK and itsideology of democratic socialism was one of the greatest impetuses to promote the development ofthe Greek welfare system. In the late1980s and the1990s, the drawbacks of the Greek welfaresystem gradually emerged. The growth of social expense had been accelerating, while theeconomic growth decelerating due to the second oil crisis and the imbalance of Greece’s industrialstructure. The lack of fairness and efficiency constrained the development of the welfare system ofGreece, as well as the fiscal problem of Greek government. In order to met the requirements of theEMU and promoted economic and social development. Greece had to restructure thegovernment’s debt and reform the welfare system for recovering its fiscal discipline.The goal of welfare reform was to alleviate the financial pressure, while the increasinglyinjustice and inefficiency of the welfare system were neglected. The ingrained clientelism traditionin Greece formed symbiont with party politics under the influence of various interest groups,which harmed the fairness and efficiency of social protection system. Populism and syndicalismwere widespread in the1980s and promoted the development of the trade unions, which couldmake significant impact on social policies. The influence of social fragmentation anddisintegration were enlarged by interest politics and clientelism. Therefore, the reforms of thewelfare system were hindered by the negative factors and failed time and again. The governmentintroduced the mechanism of social dialogue to ease the tensions of social confrontation, andultimately achieve the goal of joining the euro zone. Nevertheless, the incomplete reforms failedto improve justice and efficiency in the welfare system and failed to prevent serious debt crisisforeshadowed.The dissertation focused on analyzing the relationship of the welfare system and the socialand political features in Greece. The entry point of the research were based on the analysis of thefollowing social conflicts:(1)different groups’ primary means and ultimate targets;(2) thetransformation of class struggles into party-political/clientelistic power feuds and the dominatingrole of political parties over civil society;(3)the extensive reproduction of a contradictorycondition of state dependency on the other hand (as a considerable part of the population derivesrevenue from direct or indirect access to the state apparatus), but also incessant confrontatioinwith state institutions and policies on the other;(4)the inability of civil society to build its ownsystem of values and rules outside the sphere of the state (and political parties);(5)the obstaclesraised against controlling implicit mechanisms of revenue creation and distribution–a conditionthat hardly favors reform in the direction of systematic and efficient redistribution policies.In the analysis of the social policies of Greece, Lowi’s typology was introduced to classify the social policies in1980to2004. According to Lowi’s typology, state policies may bedistinguished in terms of the divisibility of their impact, which are respectively distributive,regulatory and redistributive policies. The dissertation would also shift attention from expenditureand instruments to policy outcomes by a detailed assessment of social security in Greece.The development of economy, politics and society in Greece was not synchronized, whichcould be the root of the inefficiency and invalidity of the social welfare system. The fragmentationof social security hindered the development of justice and rationality of the system. The absenceof social consensus obstructed the reforms of the social security system. The asynchronousdevelopment of economy, politics and society in Greece was the key issue of the construction ofsocial welfare system. It would be necessary to break through the barriers of interest politics andclientelism for the government and society, so as to fully explore the potentiality of the impetus tothe development of Greece’s economy by an effective and sustainable social security network.